Sometimes, ideas just fall into your lap.
Fortean Times #294 arrived in my mail this week. In the "Strange Days" section, on page 8, is about a quarter column of story about how a man in Cambridgeshire, out walking his dog (there's dogs again!) found "a 15ft (4.6m) mechanical gorilla" with "a number of moving parts but ...in a poor state of repair, with many of its components badly rusted."
The picture that goes with the news story is very sad, as is the treatment of the find as the discovery of a garbage dump in an inappropriate location. It's tolerably obvious that this is either (and I admit this is not likely) a deliberate pirate art installation or (and I think we can all agree that this is hands-down the likeliest option) the tragic remains of either the villain or the hero in a monumental battle of good vs. evil.
Also, somewhere in this is someone Japanese. Fifteen-foot mechanical gorillas are surprising in a British context, but routine, almost quaint, in a Japanese one.
Figure out which side the ape is on, and whether it's the same side as the person who built it - and whether the person who built it is an elderly mad scientist or a kid with big eyes and a small mouth - and you're underway.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: The Children of Active Duty
Today is Veteran's Day.
I'm an Air Force brat. All my bionotes start off like that. It's central to my sense of identity. So -
Why, when I sit here thinking about stories that connect those two things - the service brat identity, the holiday to honor service, do I come up blank?
I think it's because we didn't live on base. Okay, not quite true - we did in Alaska, which we left when I was six. But we stayed in my folks' hometown in Iowa during my dad's tour in 'Nam, and lived in town at our other stations. When I talk to other grown service brats (of which I meet no shortage, living in a major military city like San Antonio), I can tell that I missed out on a big chunk of the subculture by not living on base; a floating community of shared assumptions, conflicts, securities, fears, and structures. The caste systems in my schools had nothing to do with the serving parent's rank and had no built-in accommodations to the reality of frequent reassignments. I never had the same rulebook as the kids around me.
I'm not complaining about this. My parents had reasons to keep us out of that subculture every bit as good as the reasons other military parents raised their kids in it. If this is the origin of my tendency to stand forever on the fringes of multiple subcultures instead of immersing myself in them, so be it. If I trade a sense of belonging for flexibility, why, other people are trading flexibility for their sense of belonging, and that's fair.
But it does mean I can't write stories that reflect the world a large number of children in this world live in, and present that world to their non-military peers, even though I share an identity with them. And somebody really should.
What Service means to a service brat is that parents aren't in charge, the Service is. It means that Dad - or, with increasing frequency, Mom, or both - often isn't there; but that's nobody's fault. Authority is both larger and less personal for a service brat child than a civilian one; rebellion is a much more fraught emotion, with much larger implications, because you're not just rebelling against your parents or some vague Establishment. You're rebelling against the entire structure of the universe you live in.
I never rebelled. Never. My brother did and it was A Huge Problem. My sister, who was always the smartest of us, did a kind of end run around it. An on-base high school full of kids exercising those options must be a pressure cooker, even in peace time.
And when is it ever peace time anymore?
I know someone should write about this. All members of minorities need to be able to find their reflections in the fiction offered to them, and literature is the best, easiest introduction to minority viewpoints for mainstream readers. But I also know I can't. Somewhere out there is the service brat who can.
Please, get on it!
I'm an Air Force brat. All my bionotes start off like that. It's central to my sense of identity. So -
Why, when I sit here thinking about stories that connect those two things - the service brat identity, the holiday to honor service, do I come up blank?
I think it's because we didn't live on base. Okay, not quite true - we did in Alaska, which we left when I was six. But we stayed in my folks' hometown in Iowa during my dad's tour in 'Nam, and lived in town at our other stations. When I talk to other grown service brats (of which I meet no shortage, living in a major military city like San Antonio), I can tell that I missed out on a big chunk of the subculture by not living on base; a floating community of shared assumptions, conflicts, securities, fears, and structures. The caste systems in my schools had nothing to do with the serving parent's rank and had no built-in accommodations to the reality of frequent reassignments. I never had the same rulebook as the kids around me.
I'm not complaining about this. My parents had reasons to keep us out of that subculture every bit as good as the reasons other military parents raised their kids in it. If this is the origin of my tendency to stand forever on the fringes of multiple subcultures instead of immersing myself in them, so be it. If I trade a sense of belonging for flexibility, why, other people are trading flexibility for their sense of belonging, and that's fair.
But it does mean I can't write stories that reflect the world a large number of children in this world live in, and present that world to their non-military peers, even though I share an identity with them. And somebody really should.
What Service means to a service brat is that parents aren't in charge, the Service is. It means that Dad - or, with increasing frequency, Mom, or both - often isn't there; but that's nobody's fault. Authority is both larger and less personal for a service brat child than a civilian one; rebellion is a much more fraught emotion, with much larger implications, because you're not just rebelling against your parents or some vague Establishment. You're rebelling against the entire structure of the universe you live in.
I never rebelled. Never. My brother did and it was A Huge Problem. My sister, who was always the smartest of us, did a kind of end run around it. An on-base high school full of kids exercising those options must be a pressure cooker, even in peace time.
And when is it ever peace time anymore?
I know someone should write about this. All members of minorities need to be able to find their reflections in the fiction offered to them, and literature is the best, easiest introduction to minority viewpoints for mainstream readers. But I also know I can't. Somewhere out there is the service brat who can.
Please, get on it!
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Gee, I Love Language
My husband passed on a library book to me, Kat Zhang's What's Left of Me. He explained that the premise is a world in which everyone is born with two personalities, one of which fades over time and eventually goes away. Except this time, it doesn't. "The story's narrated by the recessive personality," he said.
It is possible that, until this book was written, or even until we had this conversation, the term "recessive personality" had never been used before. It wasn't needed. But as soon as we needed it, boom, it came to hand, perfectly comprehensible to anyone who grasps the premise.
That is one good tool we've got there.
---
BTW, if you live in the US and are eligible, it's Voting Day! Have you done your bit to preserve democracy yet? Better get on it!
It is possible that, until this book was written, or even until we had this conversation, the term "recessive personality" had never been used before. It wasn't needed. But as soon as we needed it, boom, it came to hand, perfectly comprehensible to anyone who grasps the premise.
That is one good tool we've got there.
---
BTW, if you live in the US and are eligible, it's Voting Day! Have you done your bit to preserve democracy yet? Better get on it!
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: A Really Crappy Job
So today was one of those days when you have lots of errands so they all take too long. At least Jason's Deli offered me an extra cookie.
The grocery store we shop in has had a product reshuffle. You know, when they consult the person who follows me around keeping track of what I like, find out what I've really come to count on, and replace it with something I can't possibly use. The big loser this time is flavored rice. I had two-three flavors of two-three brands that I could count on to be under 500 mgs of sodium per serving. Now there's one, and of course it's not the blessed wonderful one that somehow kept it down to 75 mgs. The new brands all have 600 mgs up. They discontinued my 200 mg artichoke pasta sauce (but I found the last five jars hiding behind the 700-mg four-cheese sauce and bought them all). They took away all my low-sodium salad dressings ages ago. I will soon have nothing left to eat when I'm too sick from the condition that requires a low-sodium diet to cook from scratch. Thank heaven for baked potatoes. (Now watch the GE foods people figure out how to grow a spud with the salt built right in, and replace all the real spuds with it.)
Anyway, you will have noticed a paranoid assumption in the preceding paragraph: the existence of a person who follows me around, tracks what I like, and makes sure it's not available anymore. Of course I know that's not really how it works. My tastes and needs fall outside the bell curve that creates the most profitable market for the gigantic corporations that run our economy, into the range of products that, though they may sell well, do not sell well enough to meet whatever profit margin the gigantic corporations are aiming for. So - no white blouses with breast pockets, no jeans that fit over my butt, no low-sodium convenience food, etc. If I wanted to be served I should have the common sense to be led by fashion and have a completely different body with completely different needs.
But it happens so consistently that it's not hard to indulge the paranoid fantasy. And of course it gives me a character. If there's a person devoted to taking away what I need, he (for some reason I'm convinced it's a man), has his own needs which must be served by the practice. He's doing it for a reason and he has some feeling about it. He's either working for the shadowy entity that controls all those gigantic corporations, or himself has so much clout with them that he can dictate terms. He must get something out of it - but what? Where's the profit in depriving me of that wonderful peach-applesauce I used to be able to get? Does he enjoy doing it? Does he resent me, because after all it's got to be a tedious job tracking my buying habits when I do so little shopping, or pity me?
I do not for a moment believe that I am particularly important in this scenario. I presumably have been chosen either arbitrarily, or for my ability to avoid the swelling middle of the bell curve and act as a kind of barometer of the unfashionable in a wide variety of consumer products. No, the center of the story is the man doing the job. He has to display a certain ingenuity at it, to avoid being noticed. I use a lot of cash (which some corporations seem to be trying to take away from me, too), don't buy much online, and use things till they wear out, so except for groceries I don't have a regular schedule. Even for groceries, though we go to the same store week after week, usually on the same day, we also make erratic trips to different stores to get different things. And yes, the stores at the more vegetarian-friendly end of the grocery spectrum do it to me, too - the store formerly known as SunHarvest recently stopped carrying my glucosamine, B-2, and worst of all, my chocolate-covered banana chips. But most of the time, I'm not buying at all. So this has got to be one of those nerve-wracking hurry-up-and-wait jobs.
I bet I'm not the only one being tracked, either. He may have two or three bellwethers to follow.
So the story could be one of those mid-century surrealist stories about the anonymity and pointlessness of the modern office job, some sort of Kafka riff in which neither the reader nor the protagonist is ever certain what's going on.
Or it could be primarily about his motivation to do the job. Presumably somebody is paying him; but is it in money? We tend to view money as the unit of value, but money is only meaningful in terms of the other satisfactions its possession enables. Does frustrating me in this way provide some other tangible benefit - prolong his life, perhaps? (But with a job so boring, with such weird hours, is that worthwhile?) Prolong the life of someone he loves - parent, child, spouse?
And, if he's working for another party and not somehow deriving his benefit directly from me, how is the coin he's paid in related to the way they profit?
It's all too murky. If I could find my antagonist's face, the rest of it would snap into place. But I tend to get bogged down in annoyance before I get there.
The grocery store we shop in has had a product reshuffle. You know, when they consult the person who follows me around keeping track of what I like, find out what I've really come to count on, and replace it with something I can't possibly use. The big loser this time is flavored rice. I had two-three flavors of two-three brands that I could count on to be under 500 mgs of sodium per serving. Now there's one, and of course it's not the blessed wonderful one that somehow kept it down to 75 mgs. The new brands all have 600 mgs up. They discontinued my 200 mg artichoke pasta sauce (but I found the last five jars hiding behind the 700-mg four-cheese sauce and bought them all). They took away all my low-sodium salad dressings ages ago. I will soon have nothing left to eat when I'm too sick from the condition that requires a low-sodium diet to cook from scratch. Thank heaven for baked potatoes. (Now watch the GE foods people figure out how to grow a spud with the salt built right in, and replace all the real spuds with it.)
Anyway, you will have noticed a paranoid assumption in the preceding paragraph: the existence of a person who follows me around, tracks what I like, and makes sure it's not available anymore. Of course I know that's not really how it works. My tastes and needs fall outside the bell curve that creates the most profitable market for the gigantic corporations that run our economy, into the range of products that, though they may sell well, do not sell well enough to meet whatever profit margin the gigantic corporations are aiming for. So - no white blouses with breast pockets, no jeans that fit over my butt, no low-sodium convenience food, etc. If I wanted to be served I should have the common sense to be led by fashion and have a completely different body with completely different needs.
But it happens so consistently that it's not hard to indulge the paranoid fantasy. And of course it gives me a character. If there's a person devoted to taking away what I need, he (for some reason I'm convinced it's a man), has his own needs which must be served by the practice. He's doing it for a reason and he has some feeling about it. He's either working for the shadowy entity that controls all those gigantic corporations, or himself has so much clout with them that he can dictate terms. He must get something out of it - but what? Where's the profit in depriving me of that wonderful peach-applesauce I used to be able to get? Does he enjoy doing it? Does he resent me, because after all it's got to be a tedious job tracking my buying habits when I do so little shopping, or pity me?
I do not for a moment believe that I am particularly important in this scenario. I presumably have been chosen either arbitrarily, or for my ability to avoid the swelling middle of the bell curve and act as a kind of barometer of the unfashionable in a wide variety of consumer products. No, the center of the story is the man doing the job. He has to display a certain ingenuity at it, to avoid being noticed. I use a lot of cash (which some corporations seem to be trying to take away from me, too), don't buy much online, and use things till they wear out, so except for groceries I don't have a regular schedule. Even for groceries, though we go to the same store week after week, usually on the same day, we also make erratic trips to different stores to get different things. And yes, the stores at the more vegetarian-friendly end of the grocery spectrum do it to me, too - the store formerly known as SunHarvest recently stopped carrying my glucosamine, B-2, and worst of all, my chocolate-covered banana chips. But most of the time, I'm not buying at all. So this has got to be one of those nerve-wracking hurry-up-and-wait jobs.
I bet I'm not the only one being tracked, either. He may have two or three bellwethers to follow.
So the story could be one of those mid-century surrealist stories about the anonymity and pointlessness of the modern office job, some sort of Kafka riff in which neither the reader nor the protagonist is ever certain what's going on.
Or it could be primarily about his motivation to do the job. Presumably somebody is paying him; but is it in money? We tend to view money as the unit of value, but money is only meaningful in terms of the other satisfactions its possession enables. Does frustrating me in this way provide some other tangible benefit - prolong his life, perhaps? (But with a job so boring, with such weird hours, is that worthwhile?) Prolong the life of someone he loves - parent, child, spouse?
And, if he's working for another party and not somehow deriving his benefit directly from me, how is the coin he's paid in related to the way they profit?
It's all too murky. If I could find my antagonist's face, the rest of it would snap into place. But I tend to get bogged down in annoyance before I get there.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Happy Halloween
We don't actually do anything to celebrate Halloween the last few years, but it's a holiday I like in principle; a flexible sort of holiday, with a variety of meanings depending on your culture and lifestyle. The fact that it's historically been the one day of the year when cross-gender dressing was legal in much of the US makes it a big day in the gay subcultural calendar. Its religious roots make it important in both Catholic and pagan traditions. Day of the Dead celebration has prompted some of the defining images of arte folklorico, not to mention coffin-and-skeleton themed candy in convenience stores. Trick-or-treat may be the best thing that ever happened to the American candy industry, especially given parental paranoia about home-made goodies. Carving pumpkins is fun, if dangerous (but that scar I got when I was six is barely visible these days.) News outlets fall all over themselves to publicize local ghostlore during this time of year; ghost stories can still get published in October issues even of mundane magazines; libraries make displays of themed anthologies of spooky stories for every taste;and TV stations start airing old horror classics, often in marathons. What is not to like?
This year, I got a nice bonus surprise: a new review of The Ghost Sitter, twelve years after publication! Not in any big, influential venue; but from a satisfying one, the blog of someone who's read it several times, still likes it, and wants to share. Again, what is not to like?
Sorry to miss the garage sale this weekend; should have had a Halloween one ready, couldn't get into gear. I trust my reputation, such as it is, will survive.
This year, I got a nice bonus surprise: a new review of The Ghost Sitter, twelve years after publication! Not in any big, influential venue; but from a satisfying one, the blog of someone who's read it several times, still likes it, and wants to share. Again, what is not to like?
Sorry to miss the garage sale this weekend; should have had a Halloween one ready, couldn't get into gear. I trust my reputation, such as it is, will survive.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
I Guess I Have to Buy an E-Reader Now...
Queer Teen Press's boilerplate is better than any big publisher's contract I've ever signed in a couple of respects. Every contract should have an "if publisher goes belly-up, rights revert to authors automatically" clause! It's never happened to me, but oh, the horror stories I've heard! No advance, but the royalty rate is generous, so we'll see how it goes. As I said earlier this week, I wrote this in the mid-90s and have never been able to shift it, so that makes it a good book to launch upon the dubious seas of the virtual book market.
Sullivan, That Summer made me write it out of the depths of my crush on Dana Scully on The X-Files (I would like to emphasize that the crush was on Scully, the character, not on Gillian Anderson; though I will happily watch anything GA is in.) It's about meeting your idols, mostly, and the fact that this happens in the context of a lesbian coming-out story is, not exactly incidental, but not the most important thing about it. But it's not edgy, which mitigated against it when I first wrote it, and it's essential to the story structure that an adult protagonist remembering the main action of the teen years intrudes occasionally, which mitigates against it these days, even though the difference between teen Cherry and adult Cherry is not profound. This, for example, is Adult Cherry:
When I get home, I stagger through the claustrophobic entryway to the living area. "I'm dead," I announce. "All is lost. Order my plot."
Chris, dressed for the office, but barefoot, continues tossing salad. "What's killing you this time?"
Obviously, she pulls this teeny drama queen stuff all the time. Mostly as a joke. Mostly.
I wish we had progressed to the point where this book could wind up in a place where a general audience, not just an LBGT one, was likely to find it, but after all we're in the age of the niche market, and after an eight-year gap in the career, I'm not going to quibble about where I make a sale, just so I make one!
I just hope there really will be some money in it.
P.S. Early voting this week! Have you gone out to save democracy yet? Better get on it.
Sullivan, That Summer made me write it out of the depths of my crush on Dana Scully on The X-Files (I would like to emphasize that the crush was on Scully, the character, not on Gillian Anderson; though I will happily watch anything GA is in.) It's about meeting your idols, mostly, and the fact that this happens in the context of a lesbian coming-out story is, not exactly incidental, but not the most important thing about it. But it's not edgy, which mitigated against it when I first wrote it, and it's essential to the story structure that an adult protagonist remembering the main action of the teen years intrudes occasionally, which mitigates against it these days, even though the difference between teen Cherry and adult Cherry is not profound. This, for example, is Adult Cherry:
When I get home, I stagger through the claustrophobic entryway to the living area. "I'm dead," I announce. "All is lost. Order my plot."
Chris, dressed for the office, but barefoot, continues tossing salad. "What's killing you this time?"
Obviously, she pulls this teeny drama queen stuff all the time. Mostly as a joke. Mostly.
I wish we had progressed to the point where this book could wind up in a place where a general audience, not just an LBGT one, was likely to find it, but after all we're in the age of the niche market, and after an eight-year gap in the career, I'm not going to quibble about where I make a sale, just so I make one!
I just hope there really will be some money in it.
P.S. Early voting this week! Have you gone out to save democracy yet? Better get on it.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Um - Yay for Me?!
Blink, blink.
I have a contract on the way. For a YA book. Called Sullivan, That Summer.
Well, for an e-book, which still doesn't feel like a real book to me. For a small press in a niche market. I've seen a sample of the company's contracts and it looks straightforward enough, though structured differently from previous contracts I've had with big New York companies for print books. The royalty rate is even generous, though industry standard is "net profits" and I've heard enough about how Hollywood works net profits that I wish the industry had a different standard. Still, this is a book I wrote in the mid-90s and have never been able to sell anywhere, through no fault of its own, and I'll be glad to have Sullivan out there working for me and giving pleasure to readers rather than rotting on my hard drive. And the fact that it's for a niche market should mean that it goes directly into the hands of the audience most likely to value what it is.
Probably because of the e-book factor, and the lack of advance, I'm not feeling any of the satisfaction I ought to feel right now. It doesn't seem like a real thing that will ever net me real money. When I have an actual printed contract in hand, or start getting editorial notes, it'll kick in. At the moment, though...
Well, put it this way. In our Pathfinder game this week, we located, battled, defeated, and my character personally beheaded the shapeshifter who enchanted our captain, wrecked our ship with all hands lost but us, and turned the captain into a ghoul. I feel a lot more like someone who just avenged all that than I do like someone who just sold a book.
Details forthcoming, after I sign the contract.
I have a contract on the way. For a YA book. Called Sullivan, That Summer.
Well, for an e-book, which still doesn't feel like a real book to me. For a small press in a niche market. I've seen a sample of the company's contracts and it looks straightforward enough, though structured differently from previous contracts I've had with big New York companies for print books. The royalty rate is even generous, though industry standard is "net profits" and I've heard enough about how Hollywood works net profits that I wish the industry had a different standard. Still, this is a book I wrote in the mid-90s and have never been able to sell anywhere, through no fault of its own, and I'll be glad to have Sullivan out there working for me and giving pleasure to readers rather than rotting on my hard drive. And the fact that it's for a niche market should mean that it goes directly into the hands of the audience most likely to value what it is.
Probably because of the e-book factor, and the lack of advance, I'm not feeling any of the satisfaction I ought to feel right now. It doesn't seem like a real thing that will ever net me real money. When I have an actual printed contract in hand, or start getting editorial notes, it'll kick in. At the moment, though...
Well, put it this way. In our Pathfinder game this week, we located, battled, defeated, and my character personally beheaded the shapeshifter who enchanted our captain, wrecked our ship with all hands lost but us, and turned the captain into a ghoul. I feel a lot more like someone who just avenged all that than I do like someone who just sold a book.
Details forthcoming, after I sign the contract.
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